


Turning Points #1 — Unlike Father, Unlike Son

by Idle_Hans



Series: Turning Points [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-06-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:22:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24905278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Idle_Hans/pseuds/Idle_Hans
Summary: If he didn't honour the man, why would he honour the legacy?
Series: Turning Points [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1802143
Kudos: 36





	Turning Points #1 — Unlike Father, Unlike Son

In later years, SHIELD's senior analysts would come to wonder if their agency had perhaps made a mistake in disguising the murders of Howard and Maria Stark as a drink-driving accident after one too many political schmoozes. Because their son swore an oath on his mother's freshly dug grave that he'd be nothing at all like the man who got her killed.

As Tony Stark saw it, his father had been a heavy-drinking weapons manufacturer who got into bed with the military-industrial complex, even deeper into bed with shady government agencies, and outright idolized the memory of America's very own effort to build the superior human. 

So all of that had to go.

It took nearly a year to talk the board of Stark Industries into spinning off the weapons division and divesting it. The kindest thing they called him was 'inexperienced'. But the company's trading name and its halo effect was Stark's to take with him even if he simply sold out and walked away, so Obie Stane and the Daddy Warbuckses among the major investors stopped fighting him and got firmly behind the equity swap as soon as Tony gave in and proposed it. They got to hand over their SI stocks — which they thought were surely soon to plummet — in exchange for ownership of Weapon Systems Incorporated, which was really just a rebadge of everything that was profitable about Stark Industries. Tony was left with absolute majority control of a hollowed out company that had very little left to it beyond a couple of small factories and a few research projects into clean energy, robotics, and hypersonic engines.

Which was all he needed to change everything.


End file.
